One Health System

Today we commence a week of consultations with the community to discuss the White Paper Exposure Draft that weas released in March.

The Exposure Draft outlines a set of proposals to deliver better health outcomes to the Tasmanian community and improved safety and quality of services, greater efficiency and improved patient support to enable better access to services.

Key changes proposed in the Exposure Draft are designed to:

Provide safer health services for patients through the development of a Tasmanian Role Delineation Framework, followed by mapping of services to determine a valid Tasmanian Clinical Service Profile. This process tells us how to configure our services more effectively to provide better outcomes for
patients.

Build confidence in our hospitals by actively defining their role in the system.

Build better surgical service around the State by establishing an elective day surgery centre at the Mersey.

Provide more health services across the North and North West where there have been a number of unacceptable service gaps like mental health and geriatrics.

Build better, more sustainable services by ensuring there are adequate volumes for high quality, sustainable services. This will mean that some low volume services that are currently spread across multiple sites will be consolidated to a lesser number of sites and others may move interstate.

We will also be launching a short video, to help explain the benefits of these reforms, including:

A Northern Integrated Cancer Service which will mean 7,500 fewer trips to Launceston from the NW each year

Almost 20% of people in the NW requiring day surgery currently travel to Launceston. We can treat around 75% of these locally at the Mersey.

More support for transport and accommodation services to patients who need them.